Contextual mobility profiling secure routing infrastructure for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) have found strategic importance in real world applications like environment management, remote explorations, disaster and warfare conditions due to their dynamic, self tailoring and adaptive nature. These networks can be quickly deployed in situations where no infrastructure exists. Effective use of these networks is largely dependent on secure and reliable behavior of participating nodes as they are also used for routing and forwarding services. A number of strategies have been proposed to handle security issues in MANET. The key distribution mechanism under such protocols can be improved by adding the dimension of profile-based selection of participating nodes. This paper presents mobility profile driven security architecture for identifying candidate nodes for PKI deployment in MANET. The mobility profiles of nodes can be differentiated between those confined to small area from nodes having high mobility and varying signal / link conditions. The distributed information is used to identify relative stationary or peering node points that collaborate to generate a dynamic knowledge base. The profiles are exchanged between peering nodes as beacons along with routing updates. The wireless domain is thus monitored to locate unpredictable behavior and improve security management over ad-hoc networks. The conceptual phase of the method is now under test on ns2 simulator.